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17.11.13

The Mefloquin Diaries: Day 534~ Mefloquin pill #1

Right now I'm sitting in Jo'Burg, South Africa sipping on whisky eating apples with cashew nut butter.

It's been 534 days now, on the road, living out of a bag, and relying on the good graces of others.
My recent adventures have me traveling through some high risk Malaria country and have to take an anti- Malaria drug called Mefloquine.

Mefloquine is taken once a week and it's the big gun's of anti- Malaria tablets, if you have psychotic tendencies or depression this is NOT the drug for you.

Oh and the other side effect is super crazy, like looney bin dreams.

This is my second experience taking Mefloquine and my dreams are noteworthy.

Think about the most painfully lucid, long lasting dream you've ever had then triple it, those are my nights now.

Dream #1

I am in Kruger Park walking with two male rangers one to either side of me, we are walking in a long snaking gorge made from a deep red dirt and sharp rocks. The land is littered with long iridescent bodies of snakes, they are discarded ribbons all different shapes and sizes each ending in a smashed head as if stomped in by a boot, marking the ground with bursts of glitter.

At first I'm horrified by the destruction that is clearly wrought by man and I ask the rangers why this is happening.

At some point between the questions and the answers a large brown snake launches itself from some undisclosed location and sinks its fangs into my legs.

Generally this is the point you wake up, not me, not with these dreams, instead I keep my calm (actually I'm not afraid) and pry the mouth apart, pulling fangs from flesh just to have it clamp down somewhere else.

This happens several times.

Then the ranger grabs the snake and breaks its head open with his heel and glitter explodes like a NYE popper all over the ground.

Something happens here I can't remember what and we walk on for some time.

This time a bigger scarier albino snake latches onto my body.

Each time the fangs sink in I see them and I have to grab the snake near the head peeling back the lips, the jaw, extracting the fangs slowly from my flesh. Each time I'm free it somehow gets its grips on me again.

I don't remember how but that one ends in a glitter bomb too and then I wake up.

I don't remember feeling afraid at all, more interested in the fact that I knew I was experiencing a dream.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 77days has in store for me, I'll keep you posted.

Do you like my stories, if so throw a tip in my tip jar, life on the road is fun but expensive.

Meditations

"You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes"

~Winnie the Pooh

"Such objects made up the daily luggage of this eternal traveler, rootless soul who made his home in dance studios, rehearsal rooms, and on stages around the world."

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

— Aldous Huxley, "Island"

"A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward."

– Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

– Louise Erdrich

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."

~Lao Tzu

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”~Anais Nin

"When you are on stage you are having an affair with three thousand people." -Gelsey Kirkland

"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse it's full length. and there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly."

~Don Juan

"It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop."—Wisdom of Confucius